B2B Mobile Marketing and Social Media Tactics: Part I

How important is mobile marketing in your B2B strategy? According to MarketingSherpa, businesses are at the forefront of smartphone adoption, yet less than half of B2B marketers are embracing mobile.

If that fact isn’t enough to convince you to add mobile to your marketing mix, consider this: The Mobile Marketing Association says that 90% of Americans who have a mobile device have it within three feet of them 24 hours a day.

But to win the favour of busy professionals, B2B marketers must employ tactics that make the workplace better, faster and easier. Although social media does have a role in B2B mobile marketing, business audiences are driven by efficiency, not entertainment, and they expect to get real value from the information they access on their mobile devices.

Here are a few tactics to help you make the most of your B2B mobile marketing strategy. Stay tuned for more!

Match Content to Buying Stages

Because consumers are so connected to their mobile devices, your mobile content has the ability to reach people at all stages of the buying process. A person may arrive at the top of the sales funnel, via social media, and stay for the duration of the buying cycle.

For maximum impact, present buyers with different content at different stages. Someone who stumbled across your Facebook page is likely to be at an earlier buying stage than someone who is actively researching your company, and needs to be provided with information, not a sales pitch. Don’t forget that social media leads may have arrived only because they saw something of interest in your social content, not because they need to purchase something.

B2B marketing content all comes down to value: the exclusive how-to instruction, the mobile-friendly video clip of the CEO delivering a message that’s not in the annual report, or even financial reports. You can also take advantage of the instantaneous nature of mobile by using surveys and polls to gather useful demographic and directional data from your audience.

In short, if your message is too pushy for buyers at the top of the sales funnel, or too weak for those on the brink of a purchase, you run the risk of driving them away—forever.

Use QR Codes to Fuse Online and Offline Marketing

Including QR Codes on print advertising is a quick and easy way to drive your target audience to the more trackable online world. If your audience isn’t tech savvy, you can go for a text-in option instead, which is something everyone is familiar with. QR Codes and text-in options provide an equal amount of data to tie into your automation systems and web analytics, so go with whichever one makes the most sense for your audience.

Take Privacy into Consideration

The Mobile Marketing Association has developed a Code of Conduct for marketers that protects mobile users from unwanted communications on their mobile devices.

It’s considered an opt-in if a user texts to join, but it’s not if someone enters their mobile number on a webform and checks the “opt-in box.” The user actually has to opt-in from the mobile device itself to prove the number is theirs.

Once a user is officially opted-in, make sure they receive information about the content of the messages they signed up for, how many to expect per day, how to get help, and most importantly, how to unsubscribe. Even though mobile phone users are more connected that ever before, they still want to be in control of what they see and when they see it.